Slashdot Mirror
Treating the Web As an Archive
An anonymous reader sends a link to a blog post by David Eaves discussing how the ease of finding information on the web affects how we analyze history. "... nothing is different per se — the same old research methods will be used — but what if it is 10 times easier to do, 100 times faster and contains a million times the quantity of information? With the archives of newspapers, blogs and other websites readily available to be searched, the types of research once reserved for only the most diligent and patient might be more broadly accessible." As an example, he points to an almost 10-year-old article detailing the events surrounding the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which some believe was a significant contributing factor to the current financial crisis.
> It makes it trivial to find someone whose opinion supports your position...
Exactly. Anybody with a functioning brain could figure this one out but like so many myths of the left it goes unchallenged. And when challenged the challenger is either thrown down the memory hole (if small, as in watch this post go -1) or shouted down violently in the hope they learn to never question authority[1] again. Or just shouted down to drown them out. And even if the rebuttal is total and absolute the politically correct version of history simply continues.
Glass Steagall was intended to prevent the sort of diversified banking, brokerage and insurance financial monsters that proved best able to survive this fiasco. Lehman Brothers, the pure brokerage play, is dead. Bear Sterns and Merril Lynch, again pure brokerages, are absorbed and gone. AIG, a pure play insurance outfit is now a zombie government semi-entity.
But we must blame someone, anyone, other than the real villians of this story. Freddie, Fanny, Congress (mostly Democrats but also fair share of Republicans who were more than willing to go along including at one notable point Pres. Bush himself) and to a small but notable extent Obama's legal work for ACORN. By 'encouraging' (quotas) lenders to make loans they KNEW would almost certainly go bad forced[2] them to do yet more terrible things to try to paper over the problem and spread the losses out, only delaying the diaster, making it bigger and infecting so much more of the economy of the entire world.
All we hear is how this was 'a failure of regulation' and thus the solution is yet more regulation. Nope. It was a failure of policy. The regulators had more than enough authority and did nothing because the banks were doing exactly what the government wanted them to be doing. A failure caused by government being too involved in 'private' finance. I put private in scare quotes because for the most part it already didn't exist and won't at all once Obama gets done. Almost no home mortagage has really been private in decades, almost all either actually go through Freddie/Fannie or at least are 'conforming' paper, meaning they meet the requirements set by Freddie/Fannie. Only the very rich got to use the actual private sector banking system to buy a home. Almost every home built in the last few decades has been built to FHA specs and recomendations, if by nothing else but osmossis. Congress set actual percentage quotas on how many loans would go to which politically preferred groups, including (in dense weasel words of course) how many had to be loans almost certain to go bad.
[1] Remember Citizen, "Dissent is the highest form of Patriotism." But only when attacking a Republican administration. Attacking the Most Holy One is treason at best and probably even worse: Racism. Racism, the crime with no defense, no firm guideline to know when one has committed it and the only punishment is banishment from all polite society.
[2] Not forced much. After all most of the people making the decisons were quite happy to squander the shareholder funds in theor trust to be seen as 'enlightened' by primitive socialist savages. Savages in the sense that they can see all the wonders of civilization, envy, and fear it, but couldn't create much of anything if their lives depended on it. After all, far too many banking/fund managers/etc executives are young college educated socialists themselves.
Democrat delenda est